The Singing Trees by Boo Walker

Chapter 21

A PHOTOGRAPH OF PAINFUL MEMORIES

Annalisa found meaning and peace in painting the city. Though she spent a little time with her new friends from work, she held fast to her dream, typically only breaking away from her brushes and paints for her shifts at the Bargain Bin or to hang out with some of her fellow classmates from Sharon’s class. After nearly three years in Payton Mills, she was starved to talk with other artists. Having sent a clear message to the three guys her age in the class (none of whom compared to Thomas), they were no longer hitting on her, which made their group feel quite safe.

Behind her easel, Annalisa came to know her view from the balcony in ways she never could have imagined. With Sharon’s urging to connect more with her subjects, Annalisa gave names to the tenants of the buildings across the street. She sneaked peeks of their daily lives when they left their blinds open, and then would give them life—or at least try to—on the paper. With each brushstroke, she would attempt to wedge her way into her subject’s skin. She named and gave a story to the old lady across the way who was not ashamed to dry her underwear on the balcony, and to the younger family who always sat to dinner the moment the man came home from work.

To Annalisa, the phone booth across the street became a window to the world for all the people who lifted that receiver, and she dived into their skin too. There was a pigeon that hung around the phone booth, pecking at crumbs before disappearing into the leaning fir tree or into the elm tree protruding from a square of dirt outside of a real estate office on the corner, and Annalisa would often include the bird in these paintings.

In attempting to get into her subjects’ heads, she let her imagination run wild with whom these callers might be speaking with. One woman might be calling her father for the first time in twenty years after learning he was dying. A man in a suit, whom Annalisa had named Philip, was making dinner reservations for himself and his wife, whose birthday he’d forgotten the day before. Perhaps this was what Sharon meant by connecting with her subjects. Maybe this was what Sophia Loren would do when stepping into a character’s skin. If she understood their motivations, then she might finally paint them true.

She continued her lessons with Sharon Maxwell, and Annalisa learned so much about a side of painting she’d not explored enough. She’d been focused on the technical aspect, but no one had ever taught her about the emotional necessity in painting great pieces. In a way, Sharon’s class wasn’t about painting at all, more about self-expression than technique. They had even had a class where they could paint with only one color.

Of course, Annalisa knew painting was cathartic—that was exactly why she did it—but she didn’t quite know that there was a philosophy behind giving everything you have to your art. How could she have, only knowing the hobbyist painters in the Mills? Sharon did a live piece in the end of July, painting for two hours as her students watched with mesmerized eyes. Annalisa thought it one of the most beautiful visions she’d ever seen, a true master who might have well cut herself and brushed her blood onto the canvas.

Sharon didn’t offer much commentary on Annalisa’s latest works other than quick tips or words of very mild encouragement over her shoulder. “What’s behind those eyes, Annalisa?” Or, “What’s going on inside your body right now? Paint it.”

All Annalisa wanted was for Sharon to say, “Yes! Yes! You’ve got it. And would you do me the great honor of exhibiting your work on my walls in the spring?”

Getting tougher every moment, though, Annalisa gave each exercise her all and continued to fill her apartment with new works, so much so that she had to shift her budget around to afford the supplies. As much as she wanted to indulge in the deals she found at the Bargain Bin, she rarely allowed herself even one treat. Her diet suffered as well, and soup with a small chunk of bread, maybe a piece of fruit, became her routine. Though she’d grown up with food at the center of her life, it became little more than a means for sustenance, the fuel she needed to make art.

Annalisa didn’t just paint on her balcony or in the studio in her bedroom either. Listening to Sharon’s advice in one class, she set up her easel in places like Monument Square or Longfellow Square or even along the sidewalk on Commercial Street, where it stank like dead fish from the markets.

In late September, on a Saturday morning, Annalisa had a breakthrough. She was setting up her easel in Longfellow Square when a stunning woman strutted by. She was striking; the way she carried herself, the way her outfit popped, she looked almost like Brigitte Bardot but with darker hair.

As the woman disappeared down the sidewalk, Annalisa held fast to her image. She could still see the details of the woman’s white-and-brown leather purse, the way it hung just past the hem of her plaid silk shirt. The woman was all color, from the velvet beret to the green handkerchief around her neck down to her stark white culottes.

Annalisa had always considered herself fashionable, a passion she’d carried over from her mother, but she’d learned so much more at Pride’s, where she caught constant glimpses of some of the most fashionable women in New England. The woman who’d just walked by had the magic, and Annalisa felt a desperate need to put her on the page.

She gave the woman a name and a story and then reached for her pencil. Under Sharon’s tutelage, Annalisa had become much more liberal in her art, stretching boundaries any way she could. She gave the beret on the woman’s head flowers that rose up like fireworks to the top of the canvas. A trail of money spilled out of the purse.

After a satisfactory sketch, she reached for her paints. With the rest of the world on hold, she fell into her creation. She’d never worked so fast in her life, and after a couple of hours, she was mostly done. She stood back and examined her work. Something was clicking.

Deciding to do the finishing touches at home, she headed back to her place for a sandwich. She spent the stroll thinking about her subject and this particular piece. Was this the voice that Jackie had brought up so long ago? Was Annalisa finally breaking through? What if she was supposed to paint women?

Stylish, fashionable, powerful, and hardheaded women.

Something felt divinely right about it. She’d painted three pieces from the Women’s Strike for Equality in August, and maybe that had been the seed. Her calling might be to give voices to these strong women. There was no doubt Annalisa wanted to be one of them herself. It wasn’t necessarily about the money that these women possessed, but that was part of it. More so, it was their confidence and strength and fearlessness. That was what Annalisa liked the most about city women. Even seventy-year-old women weren’t afraid to hop on a bus alone.

Passing by Walt’s shop, she decided to pop in and share her revelation. After waiting impatiently as he helped a customer with a broken pocket watch, Annalisa met him at the counter by the cash register. “I think I’ve found my voice. Only a few months here and I’ve found it!”

Though he didn’t share her elation, she told him about her idea of giving voices to all the women out there by putting the strongest of them on the page. Nearly shaking with glee, she drew the painting out of her tote and showed it to him.

“Oh my.” Suddenly engaged, he pointed at it from the opposite side of the counter. “This is what you should be doing for a living.”

She laughed. “That’s the idea, Mr. Burzinski.” Her heart raced with a youthful feeling of having discovered her true calling.

“Please call me Walt, young lady.”

“Walt, I just need to find a gallery willing to take a chance on me.” She’d been turned down by two other galleries in the last month. Then something occurred to her.

“Would you be interested in selling some of my work? For a cut, of course.” She didn’t mention that he could use a little color anyway. He had every shade of black and brown covered. Even her most lugubrious pieces might lighten up the place.

“I’ve got stacks of good stuff upstairs that needs a home,” she continued. At least she thought they were good, even if the galleries weren’t yet interested. Sharon still pushed her to connect. If Annalisa heard Sharon say, “Annalisa Mancuso, let go and dive into their skin!” one more time, she was going to throw someone through the warehouse window. Sometimes she’d even snap back, “I am letting go!” Then Sharon would give a silver-eyed wink and walk away. Maybe this new avenue of strong women would pique Sharon’s interest.

Walt scratched his two-day-old beard. “You are a determined person, aren’t you?”

Determined and thick skinned,she thought, as she decided to push the idea. “It might bring you some new customers. I imagine anyone looking for a fine watch or clock is in the market for a nice painting.” She eyed him like he’d be crazy to say no.

“How sly you are,” he finally said. “Well, I don’t see why not.”

Five hundred noes and two yeses,she thought. She could play those odds.

While discussing the terms, she eyed the back wall, where several metal shelves held boxes overflowing with mechanical parts and who knew what else. Feeling connected to her muse more than she could ever remember, she decided she’d love to make a new set of wind chimes that afternoon, a gift to herself for accomplishing so much in these first few months in Portland.

She leaned in. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

He chuckled in his very Walt way, almost as subtle as Nonna’s. “I have a feeling you’re going to ask anyway.”

“I want to make a set of wind chimes to keep the others company. It looks like you have all sorts of goodies back there, and there’s a hook that needs a purpose upstairs. Would you let me poke around and see if I can find something that might work?”

As grumpy as he could be, he might have said something about how the wind chimes hanging on her balcony now were nothing but a racket, but she’d told him about making them with her mother a few days prior, so that argument would have been rude.

As if realizing he couldn’t say no for fear of feeling guilty, he said, “If you must. It’s forty years of parts doing nothing but collecting dust.” What wasn’t collecting dust?

He went back to work, and she fought off sneezes as she rummaged around. For an artist, these shelves were a treasure trove of possibilities. A dusty one but special nonetheless, full of wonderfully alien parts.

After five minutes, she raised a beautiful brass piece. “What’s this?”

He looked up from his desk, where he worked on a cuckoo clock. “That’s a pendulum bob that used to swing in an old grandfather clock damaged when a roof caved in from the rain back in the . . . fifties, I think.”

“Do you mind if I use it? It could be the perfect striker to put in the center.”

He gave her a look like she’d asked for one of his kidneys but then acquiesced. “Yes, go ahead.”

At that moment, the bells of noon rang and Annalisa smiled. It was funny how her life had come to beat to the sound of the noon and midnight bells.

She returned to the shelves and searched through the boxes. She found a spool of old black nylon cord and then a few old keys and some other parts that belonged to different timepieces. She grabbed a few tiny brass pieces that she thought might be fun to include in one of her newer paintings. That wouldn’t be very “old soul” of her, but maybe some new tricks might lead her even closer to her voice.

In the next box, she came across an old photograph in a fragile frame. It was a picture of Walt from maybe twenty years earlier. He looked so much livelier back then. He rested his arm around a woman Annalisa could only assume was his wife. She had long curly locks of red hair. They stood on a beach with the ocean behind them. She flipped the photograph over. In a faded cursive, it read: Graystone, 1951.

Annalisa entered the shop from the back room, waving the photo. “Was this your wife?” She set the photo down in front of him.

She saw a slight change in his body, a slump of the shoulders, almost a deflation as Walt slowly pulled his attention away from a watch to inspect her find. “Please return that instantly.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Had she done something wrong?

“It’s fine,” he said, handing the photo back to her. “Just put it back where you found it, and that’ll be enough snooping for the day.”

“Where’s Graystone?” she asked, too curious to let it go. “I want to go there.”

“Please,” he almost barked.

She tightened up, feeling how his past haunted him.

More calmly but no less deliberately, he said, “I’d like for you to put the photo back where you found it.” With that, he returned his attention to the watch.

Annalisa glanced at the photo one last time. She could see in the younger Walt’s expression how much he’d loved the redhead in his arm. No wonder he was still in pain. That was the way Nonno used to look at Nonna. For a quick flash of a second, she wished Walt and Nonna could connect; they were both in the same spot. When they’d met, though, the first time Nonna had—albeit reluctantly—come down to visit Annalisa, the two had barely spoken a word to one another. Eh, probably better that way, Annalisa decided. Then they wouldn’t be forced to endure even more loss down the line.

She collected her finds, feeling responsible for cutting open his wound. “I’m sorry for the photo.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, waving her off.

“What was your wife like?” Annalisa asked, thinking she was playing with fire.

Looking to be at his wit’s end, he plonked the watch onto his desk and removed his glasses. “I’ll not ask about the boy you broke up with if you don’t ask about my wife. Seems fair enough, yeah?”

She looked down at the ground hard.

“Good,” he said, “now bring me down some paintings tomorrow, and we’ll see what we can do about mounting them and finding some wall space.”

She thanked him and uttered not another word as she slipped out of his shop. On the way up, she stopped to check her mailbox and found a letter from Thomas. Her heart leaped every time she’d found one of his letters, as if nothing else could bring her so much joy. She’d been corresponding since she’d sent that first letter to Fort Dix, mentioning the nude model. He’d written her back with lighthearted humor, much like what he sent to his mother. Perhaps humor was his way of coping. He’d joked about push-ups and running and more push-ups and said he spent Zero Week washing dirty jungle fatigues. The worst part was the inoculations delivered with an air gun. Makes a measles shot feel like a kiss on the cheek.

In the previous letter, he’d told her he would be moving to Fort Polk, also known as Tigerland, in Louisiana for advanced infantry training. She knew nothing about army speak, but he was slowly teaching her. It was all about acronyms. His MOS code was 11B. She still didn’t know the meaning of MOS, but he’d explained that 11B meant he would be an infantryman and most likely ship to Vietnam and see frontline action. Reading that part had struck her harshly, and she could imagine only in her worst nightmares seeing Thomas as one of the battle-weary soldiers stationed in Vietnam, as shown on the news.

Not only was his MOS an indication of his trajectory, but he wrote that most everyone in Tigerland went to RVN. She did know what RVN meant from the news. Republic of Vietnam. Fort Polk shared similar weather with Southeast Asia, so soldiers were often acclimated there on their way. Knowing that she was in no small part culpable for his situation was enough to shatter any progress she was making if she let herself mull it over for too long.

Wishing he had written to say that he was coming home and that he’d heard word of the end of the war, she raced up the steps, sprawled out on the couch, and relished every word.

Louisiana is a hell hole,he started out in what was three pages of barely legible chicken scratch. The only good thing down here is the crawdads. They’re like little lobsters and remind me of home. It turns out I love Maine. And you know what I really miss? Snow. It’s so darn hot down here.

She appreciated his humor but could feel his unhappiness. He wasn’t built for war, and she could only imagine how Mr. Sunshine was losing his sparkle. All because of her.

He asked if she’d drawn any more naked men and wondered if Portland was getting cold. He also asked her if she’d sold any paintings yet and if she was still loving Portland. Instead of offering some weak apology for getting him into this devilish mess, she wrote him about her breakthrough and asked if he’d heard about Jimi Hendrix’s death. She also mentioned that she’d tried Emma again with no luck. As she signed her name, an idea popped into her head. She went out to the balcony with her sketch pad and drew him a picture of the view. Then, to please him, she made it snow.